CHING LING’S PASSPORT.
BY MRS. HARRIET A. CHEEVER.
“And you say there is no hope!”
“None whatever, that we can see.”
“But I am barely five-and-thirty, Doctor. Only think! still in my early prime,” urged the pleading voice.
“I know it, Fairfax; I know it, my poor fellow; and would thankfully have it otherwise, but God wills it so. I cannot deceive you, and your special request was to know the truth.”
“But Heaven knows I was unprepared for it!” was the passionate rejoinder.
“Try and calm yourself, my friend,” continued the doctor in low, deliberate tones. “I’ve still another unwelcome piece of intelligence: Mrs. Carter says she can remain no longer, feeling as she does, completely worn out with her duties; and just now, with so many critical cases on my hands, I hardly know where to look for another nurse. You say there is no friend or relative you could summon?”
“No; and it makes no sort of difference who comes in Mrs. Carter’s place; I might as well die alone like a dog, if I’ve got to hand in my checks at the outset of the game–confound this heat!” and the voice even more than the words was full of bitterness and rebellion.
Dr. Wharton took his hat, but paused again at the bedside.
“I am going around by the Chinese quarter this noon,” he said, “and will do my best to bring some good assistant. Some of those Chinamen make excellent nurses. Have you any objection to trying one?”
“Oh, I don’t care a–pin who comes,” answered the poor, impatient, suffering man; and the next moment the doctor left the room as the nurse glided softly in, and the patient closed his weary eyes.
Philip Fairfax was a man of wealth and education, but his fine fortune had been sadly misused. Moreover, his naturally sound physical constitution had been unwarrantably abused by a hard round of indulgence in dissipation and vice, which had caused him in his early manhood to fall an easy prey to the dangerous malarial fever so prevalent at certain seasons, and which now had assumed a malignant form, rendering recovery almost impossible.
Just previous to the foregoing conversation, a consultation of the ablest physicians of the county had been held in Mr. Fairfax’s elegant library, with what result we have already seen.
“Do you give it up, Ching?”
“Yes: me givee up, but trust God still.”
“We tellee you, it impossible; college chances not for Chinese boys.”
“It not impossible with mine God. All things are possible with Him. Me only givee up for this term,” was the cheerful reply.
The scene was a Chinese cabin, scantily furnished, but extremely neat in its simple arrangements. On lines outside, handsomely made clothes were drying, while on the one large piece of kitchen furniture in the cabin–a huge stove–numerous irons were heating.
Ching Ling, as he was called, was a great overgrown boy of seventeen, who had picked up religion, as his companions grotesquely name it, at some of the chapel meetings connected with one of our institutions for learning. He was a quaint, original character, and could turn his hand to almost anything useful–turn it to good purpose too. He had learned to read, nobody knew how or when, and now the absorbing, irrepressible longing of his heart was to get an education, at the college. It made no difference how much or how often others ridiculed the eager desire, there it remained, and after some laughable banter on the part of his less ambitious associates on one occasion, as to his many projects and failures in attempting an entrance to those halcyon halls, his good-natured reply was:
“Oh, me wriggly in yet, somehow. You see!”
Ching Ling was ironing briskly and skillfully when Dr. Wharton’s buggy stopped before the door, and without alighting the doctor beckoned Ching to come to him.
“Want to earn some money, Ching?” asked the Doctor.
Ching’s delicate hands were instantly held out in mock display of entreaty.
“Would you go into danger for money, Ching?”
The small hands were quickly withdrawn as he replied:
“Me do no wrong for muchee monee?”
“But would you go into a close, sick room, and nurse a gentleman who has a dangerous disease–a man perhaps dying with fever?”
“Yes, Doctor; me no afraid of the sickness or the fever. Mine God would go with Ching; no God, all danger; with God, all safee.”
“Come on, then, I want you right away.”
The days grew hotter and the fever grew fiercer, and the requirements of the irritable, dying man became almost unendurable; but the ungainly Ching never flinched as with untiring, patient hands he waited upon the hard master whose young life was fast burning itself out in the relentless fires of the unyielding fever.
Mr. Fairfax had been fitfully dozing at the close of a weaker, but slightly more comfortable day, when, on suddenly opening his eyes, he saw Ching catching a peep into a little, dark book he had noticed before–one he had evidently carried about with him.
All at once he asked in a thin, vexed voice:
“What confounded book is that you’re always reading?”
The slant eyes filled with tears as a hurt voice replied:
“This mine Bible, my Christ book; my passport in this book; this no confound book, this mine dear Bible!”
“Your passport!” and the thin voice really had the semblance of a laugh it. “What kind of a passport, pray!”
“Listen: ‘There is no other name under Heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. The blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanseth us from all sin,’”–here Ching was interrupted:
“Does it say all sin, boy? look sharp, now!”
“Yes, master; all sin.”
“Let me see.”
A faint ray of light was admitted while the poor weak eyes scanned the page; yes, it was there, sure enough.
Then the sick man, roused to momentary energy, asked questions–a few that night, more the next day, until by degrees he learned all the story of poor Ching’s conversion; his eager desire for learning, and as he read the Bible more and more to his now willing listener, a new light and hope dawned for the sick man.
We cannot take space to tell minutely how Ching cried and rejoiced when one day Mr. Fairfax had a lawyer come and so arrange his will as to handsomely endow the college, also giving Ching–faithful boy that he was–a “chance;” but this was not the best of it. Ching prayed so hard, and was so skillful in his wonderful ministrations at the sick man’s bedside, and the calming, soothing influence of his passport, his “Christ book,” was so blessed, that, after all, the naturally strong physical nature of the man asserted itself, to the amazement and gratitude of the physicians, and Philip Fairfax lived to be the almoner of his own bounties.
And now Ching Ling’s pointed fingers hold a pen powerful for good among his countrymen, and Philip Fairfax is one of the chief benefactors of the blessed institution whose inmates dearly love the kind Christian gentleman, spending so much of his time and money in their interest, while always in the breast pocket of his coat is a little dark book, the very counterpart of Ching’s, containing also the rich man’s passport in time to come, “to mansions in the skies.”